I Failed You
by Caitriona695
Summary: Oneshot. AU. Kagome promised to protect Inuyasha if he came with her to the future, but there were some things she couldn't protect him from. Not WAFF. Contains implied character death.


Characters belong to Rumiko Takahashi.  
Based on Stephen by Karen Roush as first published in AJN March 2006.

Your dying had started years earlier, but I refused to notice. To some degree you tried and managed to hide it from me. But I should have noticed. Even though we had fallen out of love with far less fanfare than we had fallen in, you were still my best and truest friend. I should have noticed. The shortness of breath, the protracted vomiting, and the hours every morning spent emptying yourself into the toilet before you could go on with your day. The emergence of bones everywhere: cheekbones and pointed shoulders and the orderly stacking of ribs; I should have noticed long before.

You have been gone for 5 years today.

A phone call that morning sends me speeding to your house. I find you naked, wrapped in your fire-rat kosode, confused, and lethargic. You are everything I know you shouldn't be. I help you dress and drive you to the hospital.

The first night you slip so deep into unconsciousness that your thin limbs lie unnaturally straight beneath the sheet. I watch over you as you watched over me so many times in the past; willing myself not to fall asleep in case to take your last breath alone. The next morning I awaken in the chair next to your bed to find you sleeping more naturally, curled on your side, the corticosteroids doing their magic on the swelling in your brain. Two nights later I'm running to the corner for ramen, and now here we are eating popcorn and you are calling me 'wench.'

You are more than my best friend. Have I told you that? I sit by your bed and wonder who I will laugh with, lament with, watch the moonless night sky with. Who will hug me when I am sad and call me beautiful? I want to demand that this dying stop, scream at you not to leave me, you promised you wouldn't leave me. But instead I bring you popcorn and videos and the ramen you love. We argue over nothing. And we laugh about it, because even now, it is what we do best.

A nurse I don't know comes in, glares at us, "This is a hospital, you know!" and leaves, closing the door sharply after her. We crack up. It becomes a running joke between us. We admonish each other repeatedly, "This is a hospital, you know!" "Oh, I thought we were in the Sengoku Jedai."

It is two weeks since your admission. After the first few days you have steadily worsened. Without saying anything to one another, we both accept you won't be going home again. I talk to the hospital administrator and tell her that I will be taking an extended leave from my duties. She thinks you are a distant relation, then an old friend, now a former lover, perhaps even the reason my marriage failed. I don't care what she thinks, what else would I do for my best friend?

Outside your window the sun shines on a glorious day. "Do you want to go outside?" You look surprised, not believing. Your precious ears would be twitching if they still remained atop your head. "Do you think I could?" I want to cry with gratitude that there is something I can do after all, this smallest of things that has lit your golden eyes. "Sure, there's a porch off 2 East. We'll bundle you up in blankets." I find a wheel-chair and extra blankets and soon we're wheeling down the hall. People stare; I stare back, defying their curiosity, their fear, their health. Outside we sit silently, your face tilted to the sun, eyes closed. We stay like that until shadows envelop you and the air turns cold. "I'm ready to go back now."

You can't eat much anymore. Yet still the diarrhea is relentless. Sometimes it goes on for hours. I help you into the bathroom, then back into bed, then a minute later, back into the bathroom. It exhausts you. Soon you can't make it there in time. One night at 3 AM I help you into the shower, hold you up, wash away the accumulation of sweat, dirt, and other things clinging to the remains of your body. I remember you strong, and fit, leaping from tree to tree. Now, you are 5'11" and weigh 85 lbs.

You don't seem to fear death. Why should you, you've died before. You don't seem to fear the pain, a brother's hand through your chest was worse. You are terrified that you will lose your mind. AIDS dementia. From the early days of your diagnosis you have feared that possibility. Too much like loosing yourself to your youkai you said. And now it has begun. You hallucinate, there are outbursts, disorientation. You don't remember that your wish on the Shikon no Tama took away your strength and your disease immunity when it turned you into a full human. Sometimes you are still back searching for the shards of the jewel. And then you will be absolutely clear again. It is during one of these lucid times that you ask me to kill you. You don't say it like that, you ask me to "help" you if things got too bad for you to help yourself. "Don't let me die like Kaede," you say, having watched her die incontinent and demented, "I would do anything for you, you know that." Horrified, I answer, "But you can't ask me to do that!" But it is too lake, you have already asked.

You slip in and out of consciousness. Days and nights I sit, caress your hair, talk quietly into your ear. You're restless, moaning softly, one night you call out my name repeatedly. I had promised to take care of you if you came to my time. Now I sit by and do nothing while you lay diapered, delirious, suffering. I stare at the IV pump, watch the morphine drip. It would be so easy to accomplish what you had asked.

I still wonder if I failed you.


End file.
